With the advent of the 21st Century, IT industry is rapidly developing. The major basic telecommunication operators and value-added telecommunication service operators are fiercely competing among themselves. In order to enhance their market shares that might change quickly, all the telecommunication operators are trying to provide more services that are more attractive to users.
Intelligent network services have experienced rapid development to meet the demand. Those skilled in the art are aware of that some novel service functions like Call Waiting and Call Forwarding appear with the emergence of program control digital exchangers. These services can be regarded as intelligent services in the early phase, but their functions are simple and limited. Moreover, these functions are designed by the exchanger manufacturers. If the telecommunication operators hope to develop new services, they might encounter a lot of nuisances because they have to devise and change the software of their exchangers. A concept of intelligent network emerges following the increase of new phone services. Its basic idea is that the exchanger only works for the basic functions of exchange and connection, and all the new functions except the phone exchange, are shifted to the intelligent network. The intelligent network is not independent, instead it overlaps the existing program control exchange network. Theoretically, the new services that the intelligent network is able to provide are unlimited. With the evolution from the traditional telecommunication network based on the circuit exchange techniques to the telecommunication network based on soft switch, the soft switch device can also support the intelligent network services, and provide some new value-added services conveniently besides the traditional intelligent services.
The card number intelligent service is one of the services that the intelligent network can provide. Those skilled in the art know that the service means the user dials a special access number to get accessed to the program control exchanger, and with processing of the intelligent network, the exchanger uses the traditional circuit exchange techniques to build up a voice path between the calling party and the called party. Generally, the password account direct-dial services, for example, 9989 card and 201 card etc., fall into the category of the card number intelligent service.
The card number intelligent service provides great convenience to the users, and especially, the service attracts a large number of prepaid account card users, and substantially stops arrearage by the users of the service. However, the intelligent card number service also causes some inconvenience to the users, for example, if the calling party wants to stop the present calling and dials another phone number, he has to wait till the called party hangs up and he hears the intelligent voice prompts, then he can initiate another call, if he hangs up before the called party releases the call, he has to dial the access number and input the information including the long card number and password etc. again before he can initiate a new call to another user.
Additionally, the existing techniques may bind the card number with the phone set so as to omit dialing of the card number and password, but binding and unbinding also need independent operations.